Old Ironsides

Old Ironsides is the nickname of USS Constitution, a 44-gun heavy frigate of the United States Navy launched at Boston in 1797. She earned the name in the War of 1812 when British shot was seen to bounce off her thick live-oak hull during her victory over HMS Guerriere in 1812. Saved from scrapping in 1830 partly by Oliver Wendell Holmes’s poem, she is the oldest commissioned warship still afloat and is preserved at the Charlestown Navy Yard in Boston, sailing occasionally on her own bottom.